I'm pretty dissatisfied with the direction Del Rey decided to take
this series and I have been for a while because the place the
characters and the Star Wars Universe are at right now (in the books)
just makes me sad. The early EU was full of hope that just . .
. isn't there anymore. This was written two years ago, but with
current events in the Legacy books, it's probably even more timely.
No spoilers, but if you've read the NJO and Legacy books, feel free
to read between the lines.

Once, oh, he doesn't even remember where exactly -
or maybe he never knew – at any rate it was pretty early on, right
after the first Death Star, Luke picked up some old piece of junk
from somewhere and started fixing it up. He was always doing that,
the kid was, tinkering with old junk. Han had rather vocally never
seen the point in it until Leia had pointed out that he did exactly
the same thing day in and day out which had shut him up for a bit. It
had still rankled, back in those early days, when Leia made cracks
like that about the Falcon until he had learned to hear the affection
beneath the biting sarcasm.

Well anyway, the kid had picked
up this ancient alien contraption, some kind of a 2-D recording
device, he'd said, and after weeks tinkering with it in his off-time
– Han swore in those days Luke's main interests were his X-wing,
the Rebellion, and fixing up old machinery, probably in that order –
he'd gotten it working.

Luke had gathered them together, even
the droids, and Threepio had tried to use the box-like device to take
a flat holo until Chewie, annoyed at his incompetence, had shoved him
out of the way and taken it himself.

It's a shot of the three
of them: Leia in the middle laughing, Luke gesturing at Chewie to
push that button, no, that one!, and him looking over Leia's head at
Luke and grinning.

The picture was printed out on a piece of
flat organic plant fiber and they had all marveled over it. In fact,
for a short while like any novelty it had become quite the rage in
the base. There were other flat holos, a better one of the four of
them posing primly and properly and suppressing grins that Threepio
had finally taken (well, the top of Chewie's head had gotten cut off,
but that tended to happen), ones with them standing next to pilots
and mechanics and fellow Rebels, all of them dead now, Han could name
the dates and places each one had met his or her end, and even now he
ached a little, thinking of them. They had been good men and women,
each and every one, and it wasn't just that the Alliance had lost a
good pilot or a good gunner or a good soldier, no, it was that they
had all lost a good drinking buddy, a good kisser, a good friend.

Luke had lost the machine somewhere in their travels. Maybe
it had been in his quarters in Hoth, who knew? There had been far too
many quick escapes and things left behind for him to recall each and
every one.

But Han had a box of those antiquated holos that
he kept in one of the hidden storage compartments in the Falcon. For
many years he had forgotten all about it, but one day, while looking
for a spare spanner, he had found it – a lost bit of his past. Now,
when he was feeling particularly nostalgic or morbid he'd take them
out, one by one, and stare at all the faces. And only in that first
picture did he know how each of those faces looked today.

Leia
caught him at it once as he sat motionless in the pilot's chair,
staring, and gently pried the photo from his hand. "Oh,"
she said softly, "were we ever that young?"

But her
voice said something else, a hundred thousand something elses and Han
knew and understood. He wanted to tell her, not the her standing
beside him, but the laughing Leia of their past, of all the things
that would come to pass, all the heartache, all the pain; he wanted
to warn her somehow. And yet, looking at her then and looking at her
now, he knew, even given the opportunity, he couldn't go back,
couldn't burden her with the knowledge of the things that were to
come. Things hadn't been easy back then either, but they had been
simpler. Looking back, those had been happier days. The memory of
that was something that even time could not take away.

Grasping
her hand in his, he said just as softly, looking into her eyes,
"Yeah, I think so."

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